Is your phone number important to your business?

One of the main concerns we often hear from our customers when discussing call tracking is their reluctance to change their businesses phone number. As call tracking requires a different phone number to be displayed to website visitors, some businesses feel like this can be confusing.

Some other common objections we hear include “it’s part of our brand”, “our customers remember it” or “we paid for a vanity number’.

We understand that these objections are legitimate concerns for any business – after all you want to make sure that existing and potential customers can easily contact your business.

However in today’s increasingly digital and online world, it’s important to consider a number of things:

Your customers are unlikely to remember your business phone number

Your customers, even those most loyal, are unlikely to remember your businesses phone number. In most cases, if they need to contact you they are most likely to use a search engine, find your company’s website and your contact number.

This will also be the case for potential customers who want to contact your business.

Keeping your existing business number

The great thing is, even when you have call tracking in place, you can still keep all your existing phone numbers! This means any vanity, branded, or old phone numbers will still work. So, for example, if an existing customer calls an old number or a number from an email signature, you will still receive the call, as long as you have kept the numbers.

Also, you may want to keep using your vanity or branded numbers in specific advertising mediums such as billboards, TV or radio campaigns or print publications.

Finally, there are a number of instances where your existing business number will be displayed on your website:

A user comes to your website after typing in your URL directly into the browser, bypassing search engines.

A user comes to your website via a referral or link from another website.

A user comes to your website via organic search.

You only elect to track paid search campaigns*.

*With our call tracking solution, you can select what sources you want to track. For example you may only want to track Paid Search and organic traffic calls, which means our call tracking numbers will only display for these callers. All direct traffic visitors to your site and from other sources will still see your normal phone number. Another option might be tracking calls from Paid Search and EDM campaigns. Our solutions gives your the flexibility to choose what you want to track.

The growth in click to call

Significant growth in click to call functionality – where a user can simply click a phone number to make a call from their mobile phone – has made remembering phone numbers almost redundant. As a user does not even need to look at the number in order to make the call, they are increasingly unlikely to remember it.

In fact, a survey by one of our partners found that a staggering 92% of respondents did not recall their insurance, internet or mobile network provider’s phone numbers.

And with 4.77 billion mobile users worldwide spending on average 90 minutes per day on their phone, it is entirely likely this trend will continue to increase.

Vanity numbers can be problematic

While vanity numbers look great, they can be problematic when dialed from mobile phones as consumers have to find the digit that corresponds to the letter in the number. This can slow down their ability to make a call. Remember you want to make it as easy as possible for your customers and potential customers to contact your business.

How does call tracking work?

Finally, it’s important to understand how call tracking works and its value.

When implementing a call tracking solution you will receive 1300 numbers to use across your website and other marketing channels.

It is the use of these 1300 numbers together with code embedded on your website that makes it possible to track calls received.

Our solution uses dynamic numbers across websites. This means that a different number will be displayed to different users if they land on the web page at the same time. This increases the accuracy of your call tracking as we can match a call to the web session.

How many 1300 numbers you receive will be entirely dependent on:

The volume of web traffic you receive.

The number of calls you expect to receive.

How your advertising campaigns – both online and offline – are structured.

The scope of the call tracking solution put in place.

Your budget.

If you are allocated multiple 1300 numbers, they will be placed in a pool and will rotate across your website accordingly.

The value in call tracking

When a customer searches for your business (or a keyword related to your business) and makes a call from your organic listing, paid search ad, display ad or they call directly from a number in the ad, we can track the call.

The data we can track includes:

the ad and campaign the call came from.

the page the caller landed on.

the page called from.

the keyword searched.

location and duration of the call.

By tracking your calls and using this data, you can see which ads or campaigns are delivering calls. Used in conjunction with your online data, you can optimise your campaigns accordingly.

Furthermore, the scope of our integrations allows our data to be pushed into a host of software platforms including CRMs, website analytics, bid managers and tag managers. These platforms can use the call data alongside web data to help you make meaningful insight based on complete information.